


Screams In The Night

by aliitvodeson



Category: Age of Apocalypse (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Age of Apocalypse, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, One Shot, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, father!Victor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-20
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 11:18:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1145346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliitvodeson/pseuds/aliitvodeson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been seven years since Victor rescued Clarice from the pens.<br/>Her nightmares don't care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Screams In The Night

He came at night. Always, always came at night. When she screamed and fought but no one was ever awake enough to hear her. Not that anyone would have help her if they had. The pens have taken all that out of them. It hurts, though not as much as the experiments they put her through in the day time. But this pain lasts, and she doesn't know why it's worse but somehow it is. It's a pain deep inside her, a pain she can't sooth with icy water from the shower bucket or a sleep. And even when he doesn't come for her, when there's a break in the schedule for some unknown reason, it still hurts.

Victor comes to her now when she screams. Opens the door to her room, leaves it open and turns on the light, hugs her close to his chest and whispers her name. He talks her through the nightmares and the screams and the pain. Sometimes she wakes up and he wipes her tears and pets her hair and tells her it will be alright. She knows it won't be, that it can't ever be alright, but it's nice to think that it might be. Sometimes she sleeps through the nightmares, if you call waking up the entire complex, screaming her throat raw, informing everyone on the team just how bad it is to be a little girl alone in the pens, sleeping.

No one ever mentions it to her.

And even when the nightmares begin to die away, when she can measure her time away from the pens in years, Victor still comes into her room. Checks on her, leaves the door open so she knows he hasn't forgotten, a reminder that if she screams here, he'll come running to save her.

What she doesn't know is that there's always a guard outside her door. Morph or Rogue or sometimes even Eric. They don't ever say anything to her, no one but Victor ever does, but they stay there all night. Sometimes she wakes up and leaves the room, cause she can't bear to be in that room at night. They're gone by the time she gets to the doors. So she doesn't know of the countless nights Rogue has spent slumpt against her door, or how Eric will pace and plan while he ensures no one disturbs her, or of Morph's glances into the dark room to make sure she's still sleeping well.

They don't know how she'd react if she knew, so they don't tell her.

In the months she spent in the negative zone, Victor came to the room at night, as if he'd forgotten that she wasn't there. He'd open the door and cross the room, hop onto her bed like he used to. And in the morning, the big man would leave, and no one said anything about it. Because Morph catches himself going to stand guard there sometimes, and Eric paces in the hallway, or Rogue sleeps better when she's against the plain wooden door that used to hold back a screaming girl's nightmares.

She doesn't know about any of this either.

She knows when she comes back, it's a different man's face who haunts her sleeping hours, but Victor never comments. That it's a different name she screams, a different wish she voices in her nightmares. It's the face of the man she loved holding her down. Sometimes it starts out like a memory, riding through the desert or hoping between rocks. And then it changes, so he's holding her down only they're in the pens, a place he'd never been. Or it begins in the pens like the old dreams, but he's joined in or it's just him. She doesn't know what's worse, the old nightmares with just her memories, or the new ones, blends of the happy life she had and the living hell she grew up in.

The memories never fade, nightmares never stop, no matter how many times people tell her they will.

She's brave and strong in the day time. She leads her team, takes risks, comes closer to dying than any others and always with a smile on her face. The others follow her, because they know she's not going to run and leave them. She's loyal to everyone on the teams, and never doubts that they can do it. But when the sun sinks below the wasteland horizon and darkness falls, she's a little girl again. She screams and cries.

She's a little girl in the pens again, wishing the hurt would stop.

If she could hold back the tears with a blink of her eyes.


End file.
